Category Archive

Andrei Cucu 2016 seems to be a great year for experimental electronic label raster noton. This year marks the label’s 20th anniversary, to which occasion they presented an installation called White Circle back in March, featuring their most prominent acts like alva noto, Frank Bretschneider or byetone and some hypnotic neon flickering lights (of course), but the same month also …

Andrei Cucu PJ Harvey has turned a very sad corner. Since the early ’90s she has brought on one surprising twist of an album after another, churning out excruciatingly painful songs, switching between raw, alternative angst and highly aestheticized lullabies. To Bring You My Love still haunts on until this day, White Chalk still deliriously floats, and Let England Shake never stopped rattling, so …

Andrei Cucu Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s latest release comes to show how deeply natural and human electronic music can get. Her latest album, Ears, shows starting with the cover, the extremely vivid parallel world only a handful of elements can create. The album consists mostly of sounds generated by a Buchla modular synth, accompanied here and there by wind instruments and her own …

Andrei Cucu Loading Q3DMO CONNECTING TO LOCALHOST LOADING… CRASH INTRODUCTION SINGLE PLAYER FRAGLIMIT 5 Baba Dochia come as a welcome change of pace on Romania’s overpopulated alternative rock scene, trading in angsty generic whining for synths and very well defined, precise beats. Their guitars are not sentimentally strummed alternating between lyrical and heavy tributes to Placebo or Nirvana, their feelings …

Andrei Cucu Because serene Japanese detachment and highly technological German coldness sometimes give the most unexpected of results. Ryuichi Sakamoto – the extremely versatile piano player brings miniature motifs, each asking a different question in a foreign language, forever floating above your conversation. His suspended chords almost never seek resolution, ever so rarely falling into an actual chord progression, but …

Andrei Cucu There is a special place in between Kraftwerk-ian proto-beats, muzak and high-brow musique concrète or noise composition where Asmus Tietchens very comfortably resides. The Hamburg based artist swerves with great ease between high and low electronic music, proving to be able to make your forehead squeeze out more lines than usual, but also to provide a soundtrack for your …

Andrei Cucu It’s hard to try to piece together a coherent introduction to Robert Ashley’s huge amount of work. Like with classical opera, Ashley’s compositions are a challenge, maybe even more so than the former. He strips away the grandeur, the snobbery and pathos of the classical form and turns it either into a plastic pop television ideal (as in …

Andrei Cucu After 5 long years of silence, PJ Harvey has finally set a date for her new album The Hope Six Demolition Project. The LP will come out on April 15th, and is the result of Polly Jean’s travels throughout Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington D.C. together with visual artist Seamus Murphy. The two also collaborated on The Hollow of the Hand, …

Andrei Cucu Archy Marshall’s 2013 debut under the King Krule moniker showed the incredible force within the scrawny, rough looking teenager with an unforgettable voice. It wasn’t only the aura 6 Feet Beneath the Moon gave off, an air of urban decay mixed with a soft, extremely painful soul, but also the very fine mixture of genres encompassing hip-hop, jazz, punk …

Andrei Cucu There is nothing like a new John Zorn album to smash your new found Sunday balance and peace into, well, pieces. Prolific composer, wild child, jazz man extraordinaire Zorn throws you with The True Discoveries of Witches and Demons back into prog rock virtuoso territory, but don’t be fooled, you won’t get off that easy. He may scare you by …